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New Play Alliance

Purpose of the New England New Play Alliance:

To bring together the collective energy and resources of new play producers and developers in New England to:

Grow audiences for new plays.

Encourage more new play development and production.

Spread the word outside of Boston about plays/playwrights from Greater Boston/New England

To achieve these goals, we're engaging in a whole collection of projects. Some of the projects that are planned or currently underway include:

New Play Newsletter: We're making one central email list for people interested in knowing more about what's going on with new and local plays in New England. We send a weekly newsletter listing all readings and productions of new plays and plays by local writers to the list, and also do free ticket giveaways. You can sign up for the New Play List here. You can view a copy of a newsletter here.

Is your company staging a reading or production of a new play or a play by a New England writer? If so, be sure to let us know so we can help spread the word to new and local play enthusiasts. E-mail information to the newsletter editors at npaeditor@stagesource.org. Issues go out every Tuesday.

Publishing Project:This group has just published the New England New Play Anthology. This fabulous book includes six new full-length plays and two one-acts, all by New England Playwrights, each produced and developed by New England theater companies. The playwrights include Walt McGough, Melinda Lopez, Marisa Smith, Kirsten Greenidge, John Kuntz, Steven Barkhimer, MJ Halberstadt, and John Minigan. You can buy the paperback from StageSource here, or the ebook is available from Amazon and other sources.

Social Media Working Group: In addition to helping establish a social media presence for the Alliance itself (we have a Facebook page), this group retweets and shares social media posts about new plays to boost PR efforts around new play production and readings in New England.

New Play Ecosystem Data Project: We have gathered numbers about audiences for new plays--how many people are actually attending these new plays and readings in Boston and New England? We can now more effectively set targets and evaluate the results of Alliance projects. View the New England New Play Alliance2012-14 New Play Attendance Reporthere.

New Play Alliance "Brag Sheet": New England writers are a prolific and busy bunch. The NPA will publish a list of annual accomplishments by our writers. View the 2014 Brag Sheet here.

New Play Travel Fund. Raise funds for small travel grants for Boston-area writers to work on their out-of-town productions or readings. Their connections help benefit all New England writers, and help promote the production of New England work outside of our area. This is a small step in helping reverse the “pipeline” that seems to flow one-way. Even $1000 pays for a few flights or a lot of bus tickets. We will approach some carriers, like Bolt Bus, Amtrak, JetBlue, directly for some donated tickets to help start us off. This project is in the early stages of development.

New Play Enhancement Fund: Raise money that would be given as grants to companies who produce work by local writers. Grants could start out small, but even $500/$500 (half to the producer, half to the playwright) would help small companies a lot. This project is in the earliest phase of development.

World Domination. Not really. This group works to help promote the work of New England writers to media outlets and organizations outside of New England.

Inter-City Playwright Hospitality Project: This project will find Boston-area writers who are willing to host visiting playwrights from other cities, and set up a similar exchange with some writers/organizations in other partner cities (NYC, Chicago, DC, LA, Minneapolis, Seattle, etc.).

Playwrights Exchange To promote relationships with other theater communities, and to enhance the skills and knowledge of our own writers, work to set up exchange programs with theater communities in other cities or countries.

We need volunteers to help with all of these projects. If you see one that strikes your interest (or if you have an idea for another project that you want to help implement), please contact the NPA coordinator, Patrick Gabridge, at pat@gabridge.com.

Reports

The New England New Play Alliance (NENPA) is a new StageSource initiative working to shine a spotlight on our region’s new play development and production activities. Among its aims is to quantify these activities and their impact – how many new plays are in development, how many are being produced, and how large is the audience for culminating events? In 2014, NENPA undertook a comprehensive survey of Greater Boston theater groups, to capture a snapshot and baseline measurement of the new play sector. This is just one of NENPA and StageSource’s initiatives to support and promote new work—other projects include a weekly new play newsletter, a new play attendance rewards app, group attendance events to new plays, a planned published anthology of plays by New England writers, and the creation of a New England New Play Fund.